The Integer Alibi: Localizing Cross-Kernel Divergence in INT8-Quantized LLM Inference
Two GPU kernels implementing the same scaled INT8 GEMM interface are usually treated as interchangeable. We test that assumption: holding the checkpoint, prompts, hardware, inference engine, decoding, and quantization configuration fixed, we swap only the INT8 linear kernel (CUTLASS versus Triton) inside vLLM. At 1.7B each arm reproduces itself bit-for-bit across cold restarts, yet the arms agree on no sequence in any end-to-end comparison we ran (0/8, 0/16, and 0/64). What makes this more than a benchmark discrepancy is an integer alibi: for shared INT8 operands under a verified no-overflow bound, the INT32 dot product is exact and order-independent, so the accumulator cannot be the sour...
| Authors | Teng-Ruei Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
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